But Lance's attention had wandered. He was looking at her signature with a curious, almost wistful smile. "Erdmuth!" he repeated thoughtfully; then turned to her. "I say! you really ought to come to the ball with that name--do!" He was simply, she told herself, the most distractingly irrelevant, yet at the same time the most appallingly direct, person she had ever come across. "Really, Mr. Carlyon," she began, with such heat that the _aide-de-camp_, returning, stared; until Lance coolly asked him if he didn't think Miss Shepherd very unkind not to come to the Bachelor's Ball? Whereupon he, having by this time had enough of laces and ribbons, and begun to recognize a distinct charm in the glistening coils of hair, half-hidden by a wide hat, promptly asked her for the pleasure of a dance. Erda looked from one to the other aghast, and to her own intense surprise fell back upon the woman's all-embracing excuse, "I--I really haven't a dress." It seemed the simplest and easiest. "Oh! anything does for a fancy ball," persisted Lance, argumentatively, as he followed her out. "A tailor in the bazaar would run you up a Greek dress in no time, and it would do awfully well. All white, don't you know--" his voice slackened and grew soft, as if he saw what he described, and the sight made him glad--"all straight folds with a little edge of red-gold like--" he paused, then went on boldly--"like the sunshine on your hair. And red-gold bracelets high up on your arms--and a red-gold apple in your hand--the World's Desire--" He stopped abruptly, with a quick catch in his breath, startled at his own words. And she, too, held her breath before the vision; for she saw it also. Saw herself, as he had described her, and the glamour of it, the desire of it, assailed her, body and soul. Yet she made a desperate, a passionately resentful effort to ignore them. "I didn't know you were so well up in _chiffons_, Mr. Carlyon," she said, with a forced laugh. "Did you ever think of setting up a milliner's shop? One is badly needed in Eshwara." But the glamour of it had come to Lance Carlyon like a revelation, and the blood was leaping in his veins. "I will, if you--" he began. She scarcely recognized his voice in one way. In another she knew it must be his; for all the vitality and strength, the single-mindedness and simplicity which she had seen in him so often, were crowded into it; brought into it by fancy, concentrated by a mere suggestion--of herself. The magic of this seemed to encompass her; she sought shelter from it recklessly. "I?" she interrupted. "I don't go in for that sort of thing, Mr. Carlyon. You seem to forget my work--work which I value above--milliners! Try Mrs. Smith--there she is coming in her victoria; she is one of the best-dressed women I ever saw." She could not certainly have looked better than she did as, seeing Lance Carlyon, she called to him as her carriage drove up. "Do you know where Captain Dering is? He promised--"